Exchange Unplugged!
Sounds like an MTV show but t'was much better than that! Eileen Brown and her crew brought the Exchange 2007 and Unified Communications road show to Manchester in Association with BT Lynx. The day long event was held at the Museum of Science and Technology and I think the location was just perfect with the Dr Who show going on there as well :-)
Brett Johnson and Julian Datta gave awesome demos of Exch07 and Office Communication Server which all went flawlessly. Apparently, the last time they gave the demos, Brett's Shuttle, a quad core, 8Gb beast, ignited! That must have been fun.
This was the first time I had heard Brett present and I was well impressed. He kept the audience well engaged and his wit was classic!
Toy of the day was the hyper cool Microsoft Roundtable conference phone providing a 360 degree view of the conference room and a high res image of the active speaker.
My takeaways from the show were:
- Exchange 07 & OCS are going to change the way we communicate. Voice, Video and text can now be affordably converged on the IP protocol and with presence information, playing "phone tag" will be a thing of the past.
- Learn Powershell. It's the future! The Exchange servers Brett built were installed and configured using Powershell Scripts & commands.
If you haven't been to the Exchange Roadshow, there's 2 more dates I think. Make sure you catch them if you can. Well worth it:
2nd November 2007, Warwickshire: Exchange Unplugged in association with Post CTI
5th November 2007, Glasgow: Exchange Unplugged in association with Capito